01 2001
Why the left needs a political adversary not a moral enemy
One year after it came to power and despites the widespread
reaction that it suscitated, it seems likely that the OVP/FPO
coalition will be able to finish its term in office. In any
case, if something happens to invalidate this prediction,
it will probably be caused by a split within the coalition,
not by the strenght of the opposition. Indeed, in view of
the neo-liberal mesures that the new governement has begun
to implement, neither the SPO nor the Green have been able
to put forward a credible counter-hegemonic offensive.What
are the reasons for this lack of a convincing alternative
to "austro-thatcherism"? No doubt it is in part
due to the shortcomings of the SPO and of the Greens.But that
cannot be the whole answer and the Austrian situation need
to be examined within the context of the European Left. Whithout
denying their responsibility, it is clear that the incapacity
to offer a credible alternative to the neo-liberal onslaught
is a weakness that the Austrian Left shares with all the other
left-wing parties in Europe. The problem is a general one
and its causes need to be scrutinized. To find an explanation
for the current incapacity of the Left to challenge the hegemony
of neo-liberalism it is necessary to go grasp how deeply the
collapse of communism has transformed the dynamics of democratic
politics.
As Norberto Bobbio pointed out in an article in La Stampa
as early as June 1989, the crisis of Communism represented
a real challenge for the affluent democracies. Will they be
capable of solving the problems to which that system proved
incapable of providing solutions? In his view it was dangerous
to imagine that the defeat of Communism had put an end to
poverty and the longing for justice. "Democracy, he wrote,
has admittedly come out on top in the battle with historical
communism. But what ressources and ideals does it possess
with which to confront those problems that gave rise to the
communist challenge?"
If we examine ten years later what has been democracy answer
to that challenge there are not many reasons to be optimistic.
Social democracy, far from having won the struggle against
its old antagonist, has been profoundly affected in its very
identity. To be sure, many more social democratic parties
are now in power than at that time, but the kind of politics
that they are implementing could hardly qualify as "left".
In fact they have been steadily moving towards the right,
redefining themselves euphemisticaly as "centre-left".
Under the pretence of "modernising" social democracy
what the "Third Way" and the "neue Mitte"
are doing is abandonning the struggle for equality which has
always been at the core of social democracy. We could even
say they are well on the way to liquidate the Left project
altogether. There is no doubt that the outcome of the crisis
of communism has been so far the reinforcement and generalisation
of the neo-liberal hegemony.
This indicates that a great opportunity has in fact been lost
for democratic politics. In 1989 the possibility existed to
begin thinking seriously about the nature of democratic politics,
in a way unencumbered by the mortgage which the communist
system had represented before. This was the time to redefine
democracy in function of what it stands for and not simply
negatively in opposition to what it was not: Communism. There
was a real chance for a radicalisation of the democratic project
because traditional political frontiers had collapsed and
they could have been redrawned in a more progressive way.
What happened was the opposite . What we heard were discourses
about "the end of history", the disappearance of
antagonism and the possibility of a politics without frontiers,
without a "them"; a "win-win politics"
in which solutions could be found that favour everybody in
society.Today social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich
Beck argue that with the demise of communism and the socio-economic
transformation of society linked to the advent of the information
society and to the phenomenon of globalisation, the adversarial
model of politics has become obsolete and that what we need
is a politics "beyond left and right", a politics
not any more structured around social division and without
the us/them opposition.
This "post-political" discourse is accompanied by
the promotion of humanitarian crusades, ethically correct
good causes and the increasing reliance on the judiciary to
deal with political issues. What this signifies is the triumph
of a moralizing liberalism which pretends that the political
has been eradicated and that society can now be ruled through
rational moral procedures and conflicts resolved by impartial
tribunals. It is the culmination of a tendency inscribed at
the very chore of liberalism which, because of its constitutive
incapacity to think in truly political terms, always has to
resort to another type of discourse: economic, moral or juridical.
However the liberal incapacity to acknowledge political antagonisms
does not make them disappear. Despites the fact that the key
words today are those of "good governance" and "partisan
-free democracy" no politics is possible without defining
frontiers. The democratic consensus proclaimed by all those
who celebrate the "centre" cannot exist without
defining an exterior which by its very exclusion secures its
identity and its coherence. Hence the necessity of defining
a "them" whose existence will provide the unity
of the democratic "we". But since one cannot think
of politics in adversarial terms, this "them" cannot
be envisaged as a political adversary any more. It is therefore
on the moral terrain that the frontier is drawn.This is why
the "extreme right" - a rather undifferenciated
and unexamined entity- is increasingly presented as the personnification
of the "evil them" against which all the good democrats
should unite.
Clearly, what we are witnessing is not the disappearance of
the political antagonism but a new mode of its manifestation.
Given that it cannot be articulated in terms of a confrontation
of hegemonic socio-economic projects, this antagonism now
expresses itself in the moral register. What is at stake is
still a political conflict but disguised as a moral opposition
between "good" and "bad". On one side
the good democrats who respect universal values and on the
other side the representatives of evil, the racist and xenophobic
right with whom no discussion is permitted and which has to
be eradicated through moral condemnation.
The problem with this conflation of politics with morality
is that it forcloses the possibility of posing what are the
fundamental questions that a left-wing politics must address,
those linked to the transformations of the key power relations
in society and with the conditions for the establishment of
a new hegemony. Moreover it does not help understanding the
reasons behind the increasing success of right-wing populist
parties and impedes envisaging how one can struggle against
them on a truly political terrain. The same criticism can
also be addressed to the widespread identification democratic
politics with the defense of human rights. Indeed nowadays
there is a growing tendency to use the defense of human rights
as the defining feature of democracy at the expense of the
element of popular sovereignty which is seen as "old-fashioned".As
Marcel Gauchet has pointed out, the fundamental shortcoming
of a politics exclusively centered on human rights is that
it has nothing to contribute to an understanding of the causes
of present injustices. Indeed, by discrediting attempts to
find explanations for what is deemed "inacceptable",
it does not help designing strategies to come to terms with
its causes. This is why such a politics is so often limited
to discourses of denunciation.
Against all those fashionable discourses about the end of
antagonism and the displacement of politics by morality there
is today an urgent need to reestablish the centrality of the
political and this requires drawing new political frontiers
capable of giving an real impulse to democracy. One of the
crucial stakes for democratic politics is to begin providing
an alternative to neo-liberalism. It is the current unchallenged
hegemony of neo-liberalism which explains why the left is
unable to formulate a credible alternative project. The usual
justification for the "there is no alternative dogma"
is globalization. Indeed the argument often rehearsed against
redistributive type social democratic policies is that the
tight fiscal constraints faced by governments are the only
realistic possibility in a world where global markets would
not allow any deviation from neo-liberal orthodoxy. This kind
of argument takes for granted the ideological terrain which
has been established as a result of years of neo-liberal hegemony
and transform what is a conjonctural state of affairs into
an historical necessity. When it is presented as driven exclusively
by the information revolution, globalisation is detached from
its political dimension and appears as a fate to which we
all have to submit. This is precisely where our critic should
begin. Scrutinizing this conception, Andre Gorz has argued
that instead of being seen as the necessary consequence of
a technological revolution, the process of globalization should
be understood as a move by capital to provide what was a fundamentally
political answer to the "crisis of governability of the
1970's". In his view the crisis of the fordist model
of development led to a divorce between the interests of capital
and those of the nation-states. The space of politics became
dissociated from the space of the economy. To be sure this
phenomenon of globalization was made possible by new forms
of technology. But this technological revolution required
for its implementation a profound transformation in the relations
of power among social groups and between capitalist corporations
and the state and it was made possible by deliberate choices
by governments. The political move was the crucial one and
it coincided with the rejection of the consensus around the
welfare-state which had been characteristic of the period
posterior to the second world-war. This took place at different
times in the various countries and now it has finally reached
Austria.
All over Europe social-democratic parties have shown their
impotence in front of this neo-liberal revolution because
they have been unable to acknowledge its political nature.Having
accepted the dogma of "globalization" third way
theorists are unable to grasp the systemic connections existing
between global market forces and the variety of problems-
from exclusion to environmentsl risks- that they pretend to
tackle. It is very symptomatic indeed that they have recourse
to the language of "exclusion" which does not provide
any tool to analyse the origin of that phenomenon but limits
itself to describe it. By redefining the structural inequalities
systematically produced by the market system in terms of "exclusion"
they eschew any type of structural anaysis of their causes
and side step the fundamental question of what needs to be
done to address them. As if the very condition for the inclusion
of the excluded did not require at the very least a new mode
of regulation of capitalism which will permit a drastic redistribution
and a correction of the profound inequalities caused by neo-liberal
policies.
Without advocating the kind of total overthrow of capitalism
that some nostalgic marxists are still dreaming of, it seems
to me that one should be able to think of alternative to the
neo-liberal order, a real hegemonic alternative not the supposedly
third way between social-democracy and neo-liberalism that
is currently advertised by its advocates as the "new
politics for the new century". Indeed far from being
an alternative to the neo-liberal type of globalisation, such
a politics accepts the basic tenets of neo-liberal orthodoxy
and limits itself to helping people to cope with what is perceived
as a "fate"by making themselves "employable".
No wonder that we now live in political systems where there
is no real opposition.
One of the main problems nowadays is that the coming to terms
by the left with the importance of pluralism and of liberal
democratic institutions has been accompamied by the mistaken
belief that this meant abandoning any attempt to transform
the present hegemonic order. Hence the sacralisation of consensus,
the blurring of the frontiers between left and right and the
trend to replace the political adversary by the moral enemy.
This is, in my view, one of the main reason for the incapacity
of the Left to envisage the conditions for a radicalization
of democracy. There cannot be a radical politics without the
definition of a political adversary because to be radical
is to aim at a profound transformation of the relations of
power, at the creation of a different hegemony.
If there is a lesson that the left should draw from the failure
of communism, it is that the democratic struggle should not
be envisaged in terms of friend/enemy and that liberal democracy
is not the enemy to be destroyed in order to create something
abolutely new from scratch. If we acknowledge that the ethico-political
principles of modern liberal democracy- understanding by ethico-political
principles what Montesquieu defined as "the passions
that move a regime"- are the assertion of liberty and
equality for all, it is clear that we could not find more
radical principles to organize a society. The problem in "actually
existing liberal democracies" is not their ideals, but
the fact that those ideals are not put into practice. So the
task for the left is not to reject those ideals, with the
argument that they are a sham, a cover for capitalist domination,
but to fight for their implementation and for making liberal
democratic societies accountable for their ideals.
But such a struggle, if it should not be envisaged in terms
of friend/enemy, cannot be envisaged either as simple competition
among interests, taking place in a neutral terrain and where
the aim is to reach compromises and to aggregate preferences.
This is of course how democracy is conceived by many liberal
theorists and unfortunately, it seems that this is the way
left wing parties are now visualizing democratic politics.
It is the reason why they are unable to grasp the structure
of power relations and to think in terms of creating a new
hegemony. Obviously it chimes with their refusal to draw political
frontiers and their belief that they can side step fundamental
conflicts of interests by avoiding to define a political adversary.
But, as I have tried to show, this lead to a new form of friend
/enemy politics, this time with the enemy being conceived
in moral terms. This explains why it is so difficult today
to envisage the creation of an opposition with hegemonic perspectives.
On one side politics is reduced to a competition of interests
among the "we" of the democratic bloc, on the other
side the identity of this democratic block is secured by the
denunciation of the "evil them". In this oscillation
between the liberal competitor and the moral enemy what is
precluded is the very place of the political adversary. The
consequence is to forclose any possibility of putting forward
a real alternative to the current hegemony of neo-liberalism
.
That the traditional conceptions of Left and Right are inadequate
for the problems we are facing, I readily accept. But to believe
that the antagonisms that those categories evoke have disappeared
in our globalized world is to fall prey to the hegemonic liberal
discourse of the end of politics. Far from having lost their
relevance the stakes to which left and right allude are more
pertinent than ever. What is needed is a widening of the field
of politics so as to offer people a real say in the kind of
society they want to live in and the type of future they want
to built. Are the enormous possibilities opened by the new
technologies going to be left in the hands of experts and
monopolized by the big transnational corporations? Or are
a variety of different alternatives going to be made available
thanks to which people will be able to choose which world
they will inhabit ? As the recent controversies about mad
cow disease, genetic transformations and treats to the environment
testify, the range of issues on which crucial decisions for
the future need to be made is widening. In all cases fundamental
relations of power are at stake.Contrary to what the dominant
discourse wants us to believe, there are alternatives. Who
is going to articulate them and confront the forces which
are trying to impose their own interests as the only rational
solution? This is the challenge that the European Left needs
to tackle in order to become a real force of opposition.